Teresa Chuc Dowell’s poems appear in or are forthcoming in journals such as The National Poetry Review, Babel Fruit, EarthSpeak Magazine, The Prose-Poem Project, Rattle, and Verse Daily. Her poetry also appears in the anthology New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press, 2010). Teresa’s poetry chapbooks are Danaus Plexippus Plexippus (Victorian Violet Press), Cartography of Family (Chippens Press), Cartesian Product (Silkworms Ink), and Truth is Black Rubber (Silkworms Ink). Teresa’s first book of poetry, Red Thread, is forthcoming in fall 2012. She is graduating with a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (poetry) from Goddard College in Vermont in January 2012. Visit Teresa at www.tue-wai.com

Brett goes to war and comes back as a folded flag. There’s a check too, for a little over $38,000. Brett’s life insurance after government taxes. Dad puts that money in the bank and says it’s for my college fund. Coming home early from school one day I watch Mom through the kitchen window cut the flag to pieces. Shreds of red, white, and blue scattered about the linoleum floor.

Cameron calls, stoned in his dorm, and tells me he’s sorry. He’s sorry that my brother is dead and I’ll never see him again. Cameron says there’s an antiwar protest next weekend on his campus and if my parents buy me a Greyhound ticket to Oregon then he’ll take me to it. Twenty-five minutes go by on the phone and he never asks if I’m okay. Then he wants to know how school is.

School is the place where I’m now the girl with the dead war hero brother. Even a moment of silence for Brett was held during the morning announcements where most kids looked at their desk while others finished homework they didn’t do the night before. I looked at my desk.

On the phone Cameron says not to be mad that he hasn’t called in over two months, but it was the only way he could get over me. He says if it makes me feel any better he wrote the lyrics to “One Armed Scissor” over his dorm room door and the RA saw it and thought it was some hipster suicide note and he ended up spending a night in the campus medical center. I think I smile because that used to be our song. And then I tell him my parents are going to make me see a psychologist since I’m still a minor.

“Maybe it’ll be good for you,” he says.

I don’t think I know how to act, I tell him.

“Try to act normal.”

I didn’t mean around the psychologist.


I tell Cameron I need to go, and hang up when my jaw starts to hurt from listening to him. Cameron used to hide post-it notes in my bedroom. They’d say things like:

“Life is an etch-a-sketch.”

“Time is only moments that aren’t memories.”

“I think about you in colors that don’t exist.”

I’m not sure how many he left, but I’m afraid of finding more. Once there was a postcard with a Picasso painting on it in the mail that said, “Last month—I hung a picture of you on my wall and sometimes I stand naked in front of it.”

It was written in red ink. There was no return address.


Right now my mom is sitting on the porch by herself drinking clamato beer. There’s a birdbath in the backyard, but no birds today. It’s sunny.

I watch this from behind the blinds of the sliding glass door.

When I tap four times on the glass she doesn’t turn around. My mother was once a beautiful woman. Once, we went to an animal shelter and she told me every dog that isn’t adopted in less than three weeks gets a shot of sodium pentobarbital and sent to the crematory. That’s twenty-one days a dog has to save its own life.

My mom was married at twenty-one. I wave through the glass. It’s smudged.


Cameron calls the next morning to tell me a story. He says that he would have told me last night, but he only remembered it this morning.

Cameron says that when he was a kid, whenever it was he went by Cam instead of Cameron, his best friend, Benny, lost his mother to a car wreck. Benny’s dad didn’t have the heart to tell him his mom was dead. Instead, he told Benny she had gone on a long trip.

I’m listening to Cameron, watching the outside world from my window. Newspapers are piling in the driveway. I count eight.

Cameron says at six years old, he and Benny don’t know what death is. At six, Benny wants his mom home and little Cam wants his friend to be happy.

Lying on my bed, there’s a spider crawling across the ceiling.

Cameron tells me that he and Benny made posters with green crayon. They read, “Missing: My Mom.” He asks if I’m still listening.

He says on some of the missing posters there’d be a drawing. Benny would draw his mom as a stick figure and say this is who was missing. It could be anyone, just as long as they were missing.

Benny moved away the next year. Over the phone, Cameron says they haven’t talked since then.

Over the phone, there’s a voice that says, “I never stopped thinking about you.”

My dad has been working all morning. In the hallway, he’s removed all the framed photos of Brett. The photos, they’re in a box in the garage now. Next to the dog kennel and behind the boxes of Christmas ornaments. Now there’s nothing but empty frames hanging from the walls.

Cameron says, “I miss your green eyes. I miss the way I could feel them as you’d follow my every move. Sometimes when I dream, I feel them…see them…”

Into the phone I say, I have to go now.

“Yeah,” Cameron says. “Benny’s mom never came home either.”


Later that night Cameron calls again. He’s stoned. I know it. He wants to know if I’m alone.

What do you mean? I ask.

“Do you remember when we first started dating, and I’d call your house late at night from the phone booth outside the movie theaters and tell you how to touch yourself? Do you remember those days?”

I remember when Brett picked up the phone during one of those times, I say.

“Well Brett isn’t there anymore, is he?”

There’s a moment before I hear the pop and whir of the heat coming on.

“I’m sorry,” Cameron says. “That was…weird.”

I hug a pillow against my chest.

“Spring is ending,” Cameron says.

I scratch off the last of the pink on my thumbnail.

“Do you remember the time we went to Cecret Lake and Donny lit himself on fire? It was cold today and being outside made me think of that. It was cold that day too. Remember how Leo and I had to carry him down the trail and flag down a car since his leg was burned so bad? He kept asking if they were going to have to amputate his leg. That was a fun day.”

I picture Cameron lying on his bed, eyes red and puffy and picking at his leg hair.

“Are you wet now?” he asks.

No, I say.

“I saw a girl today. She was wearing a sweatshirt that said PINK but the sweatshirt was blue. You’re smiling, aren’t you?”


When three days go by and Cameron doesn’t call, I walk in on my parents while they’re pretending to watch a rerun of Seinfeld.

I’m going to Oregon, I say. For the weekend, I won’t be gone long.

“What’s in Oregon?” one of them asks.

I’m not sure yet, I say. I’ll need to borrow some money.

The TV says, “I lie every second of the day. My whole life is a sham.”


In the waiting room of the bus station are magazines with people who are smiling. Their teeth are white. White like the way you’d picture the gates of heaven white. There’s a TV high on a stand in the corner with dust piling on it. A midday soap is playing in Spanish. There’s a woman who’s knitting something purple and everyone else looks like they’d rather be shoving a shotgun in their face.

When Brett was a senior in high school he took me to a petting zoo.

“All these animals,” he said, “they were captured and put in cages.”

There was a sheep backed into a corner. Some snot nosed kid trying to shove hay in the animal’s face.

“Can you imagine what it’d be like to be put in a cage your entire life?”

At this petting zoo, there was a reptile exhibit. It was dark inside. There were fake trees and music playing along with thunderstorms and monkeys hissing that apparently imitated the rainforest. Brett pointed out a snake that looked like it was being forced to stay alive. There was a pronounced bump in its scales. Brett said, “That was a living mouse this time yesterday. It’s kind of funny isn’t it? Life feeds on life.”

And on this bus, I begin to feel like whatever I ate last probably felt like right before it died.

Brett’s funeral was eleven days ago. In my backpack on the seat next to me are the pieces that are left over of him. I take out a blue strip and rub the fabric between my fingers. He held my hand in the petting zoo because I was afraid of the animals.

The Greyhound’s engine awakens and a woman with big hair, four seats in front of me, talks into her phone, I hear her say, “I can’t believe it’s March already.”

She says, “This year, it’s going by so fast.”

She says, “But you…you should know it’s never too late for something different.

Jd Hamilton is from a small town tucked away in the southwestern pocket of Montana. A junior in college, he is majoring in Psychology at the University of Montana and upon graduation he hopes to obtain an MFA in either Fiction or Screenwriting.

football buffs               in Philadelphia’s aviaries vault the beer-can
casualties                     of another round of fumbled punt returns.

parking authority tyrants                              toy with every block possible
along Philadelphia’s                                     deliriousness of cobblestone.

such miserable hospital cafeteria coffee in Philadelphia’s dirty city snow.

searching for greater proof, old Bill Cosby impersonators
_                                _ gig in Philadelphia’s bakeries, analyzing
the antics                      of minuscule scoops of Schuylkill River.

soft-hot-pretzel vendors           rumble through Philadelphia’s hardhat zones
_                                             _for the new unusual to squirt on 2-for-1 sales.

tourists go all in          at the high stakes poker game of Pat, Geno, Jim
__                              _& Tony, just to see who has the fullest full house
in all Philadelphia.

_                 _but Oh, dem golden slippers—

ring a new one in! communities in costume! clubhouses of gusto!

Mockingbird Comics    cakewalk the up-the-street strut in Philadelphia’s
_                                  _classic laughter for rambunctious floating revelry.

snare drums herald        the String Band strum in Philadelphia’s spectacular
_                                  _of banjos flamboyant, saxophones and glockenspiels.

elated, Fancies and Fancy Brigades don silk and detonate in Philadelphia’s
_      _get-down goodness for a new calendar year of old family traditions.

“pomp and panoply! capped and caped! speckled and sequined!”

_       _an annual parade            of Auld Lang Syne-eyed celebrants: oh!
_                                              _them special Philadelphians—yes, when

the Mummers come, the city’s murder count fades away, back on down
_                                              _to zero.

PAUL SIEGELL is a product of 1977 and currently resides in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of three books of poetry: wild life rifle fire (Otoliths Books, 2010), jambandbootleg (A-Head Publishing, 2009) and Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books, 2008). Trailers are yours for the YouTube-viewing [here], and reviews are yours for the Goodreads-reading [here]. Paul is a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly, and has contributed to American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Dark Sky Magazine, Rattle and many other fine journals. Kindly find more of Paul’s work at ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL.






An image from the annual Mummers parade in Philadelphia.

Over the years, we have asked to hear your stories and your dreams and from the onset that has included tales of the Afghan and Iraq wars. It may be true that in daily life and daily news these wars are easily forgotten, but that has never been true of our writers. And so this month we publish Jd Hamilton’s short story, Melatonin, whose teenage heroine tries to balance the grief of losing a brother to war while at the same time a boyfriend to life: “Somewhere there’s a voice that says, ‘I miss your green eyes. I miss the way I could feel them as you’d follow my every move. Sometimes when I dream, I feel them…see them…’ Into the phone I say, I’m sorry. And, I have to go now. ‘Yeah,’ Cameron says. ‘Benny’s mom never came back either.’”

And because we love truth in contradiction, life in death, our poetry editors will feature work from 27 year-old, Jake Sheff, US Air Force reserves medical doctor and new father, whose poem, The Day I Met Madeleine Rae, sensually captures a moment in early fatherhood: “in the ex-homemaker’s mind are pretty little seeds as she is shaking / honeydew like a maraca at the market. The ultrasound today is like that: / peeking with our ears.”

But because not all of us are yet fully formed, we celebrate the process of self-discovery with the prose poem, Rough Draft, by Teresa Chuc Dowell: “Let the blank spaces cuddle words and let my hair grow long as the lines from my pen…My body is a rough draft; in my blood, the letters float like cells.” And we honor those of us who continue to try for Everest even when we fall with Mary Catherine Owen’s nonfiction piece, I was (Almost) a Twentysomething Jeopardy! Contestant: “This is what I’ve been training for my whole life…I may not be able to run a five-minute mile, and small children laugh at my attempts at drawing, but I can name all 120 Crayola colors and 35 places of pi…”

For some the fall from peaks can be harder and more bloody than for others, which we find in Nikia Chaney’s reflection on sex workers, passively, with known intent: “cut acacias into squares / and put a petal fitted sheet / on the bed, ripped it down the middle / with sharp leaves and his open wallet / and wall yourself in silk streams”.

And when defeat comes, as it can, sometimes we find comfort in hometowns and the promise of a new year as in Paul Siegell’s TWO STREET, JANUARY FIRST: “Mockingbird Comics cakewalk the up-the-street strut in Philadelphia’s / classical laughter for rambunctious floating revelry. // snare drums herald the String Band strum in Philadelphia’s spectacular / of banjos flamboyant, saxophones and glockenspiels.”

Thank you for reading, thank you for contributing, and thank you for sharing with us. The stories and poems mentioned are only a taste of what is to come, but we hope you take something away from at least one piece. As we continue the struggle to uncover something beautiful in a world that too often is occupied with distractions and powers we don’t contribute to, at least, with all our Splinters, we can hope to find one fiber to grasp on to.

poetry by Nahshon Cook
Bangkok, Thailand
12/26/2010

Nahshon Cook’s poems have appeared in literary publications including Spiritual Directors International, The Houston Literary Review, Post Poetry Magazine, Epic Rites Journal, the Origami Poetry Project, Euonia Review,  and the Salmon Poetry Anthology Dog’s Singing. His first collection of poetry A New Beginning was published in January 2010 by Paper Flower Press and was nominated for the 2011 Colorado Book Award. He has poems forthcoming inPresipolis Magazine, A&U, and the Desperanto Press Anthology: Bound By Secrets 2.

toward a view of the city.
San Francisco undone at a distance,
silent without street music
those horns that escape Octobers.

Pipers lift off
moved to swarm into a beast of birds,
back and forth, black, white, black,
each turn tuned like a beatmatch.

The port cranes are still.
They seem to suspend the bridge,
its tipping wire shore to shore
cars drawn away from Oakland

toward downtown,
to its fortress of four-sided
mystery, its hills atop history,
its blended blueness.

Breean Lowe was born in San Diego, California, in 1975. A graduate of UCSD’s writing program, her search for life experience lead her to live in, love and leave several port towns on the West Coast. A poet, editor and copywriter, she lives in Oakland with her scientist husband, pup and a fighting fish. She is finally writing her first book of poetry.

in a cardboard box near the beach’s massive stones rests empty bottles of sugar cane soda or 30 cents for the weekly bottle collector with filth ridden dingy fingernails. ruined vacation in malibu when being stoned pointed toward faltered moments of erectile dysfunction from a whiskey weekend. the wafting cartoon sound effect of a car accident from the expressway has a delicate decrescendo of a stone smashing the bay parlor window. a woman’s umbrella tore at the keystone and raged from her hands in command with the bellow of the wind echoing the unvoiced boulevard. standing in front of the pacific ocean piercing stones through water looking for clues from ripples like small brushstrokes in the painting van gogh made a few days before he died. flushed the toilet before zipping then quickly clench the gut where the stones force sharp pain. in the den amidst clouds and an early Stones melody though can’t remember which one.

Born in Brooklyn, New York on Thanksgiving of 1984, Giuseppe Infante is currently working toward his MFA in Creative Writing at Long Island University. Growing up and still residing in Brooklyn, he is a writer, poet, student, tutor, hospital employee, musician and hockey player, as well as a founding editor of the small independent press Overpass Books.  His poetry has appeared in Brooklyn Paramount, Shamboree and Downtown Brooklyn. He enjoys green tea, road trips, Phish and chicken parmigiana.

]]> http://www.splintergeneration.com/reasons-not-to-swim-at-night/feed/ http://www.splintergeneration.com/the-produce-aisle/ http://www.splintergeneration.com/the-produce-aisle/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:31:38 +0000 Scott http://www.splintergeneration.com/?p=2769 Do not buy the lettuce
those frothy topped leaves
are festering with bugs.
Soft-bodied caterpillars follow
their jaws dragging their bulging
green weight.  Imagine
they could be crawling through your intestines
looping and burrowing through membranes
with their many sticky feet.
The broccoli is a colony of gnats
the cabbage is writhing with grubs
those bananas from Ecuador are ripe
with fruit flies, invisible
until they erupt from your throat.
Your body a breeding ground
as if you were already buried
and prone, those earth dwellers stripping
the flesh from your bones.  The rot
and wither - a molding tomato
the skin giving way
as you place it in your mouth and chew.

Laurel N. is a poet and traveler.  She has worked in various non-profit organizations aroundthe world and has taught English in Japan, Ecuador and Cambodia.

1. I am the Lord thy G-d. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 2. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy G-d in vain. 3. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them. 4. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. 5. Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long. 6. Thou shalt not kill. 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery. 8. Thou shalt not steal. 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 10. Thou shalt not covet.

I am the Lord thy G-d. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy G-d in vain. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet.

I am the Lord. Thou shalt have no other gods. Thou shalt not take the name in vain. Thou shalt not make graven image. Thou shalt not bow down. Remember the Sabbath day. Honor thy father and mother. not kill. not commit adultery. not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. not covet.

I am. no other gods. name in vain. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt. Remember the day. Honor. kill. commit. not. Thou shalt witness. covet.

I am. Remember. Commit. Honor. Witness. Covet.

I am. Remember. Commit. Honor. Witness.

I am. Remember. Honor. Witness.

Remember. Honor.

Remember.

Joey Connelly earned his MFA from Ashland University in 2010, and he is an Assistant Professor of English at Kentucky Wesleyan College.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Medulla Review, Floorboard Review, Louisville Review, and Peripheral Surveys.